Some Scraps on Beauty-in-the-Ghost
Sarah Wood
As one knows, Hopkins, from a very young age, already as an undergraduate and in his first diaries, loved to indulge in etymological speculations. For example, he discovered with glee, in a dictionary
by a certain Jamieson, the existence of the word scape. It is
another form of skep or skip, meaning “basket” or “cage.”
Well, Hopkins forges the word inscape …
Jacques Derrida[1]
Skip. For the love of words.You might as well: a beginning never comes first, neither in principle nor life. Nothing really begins on page one or on day one or at year dot. What has no proper place, what is unbound, out-of-joint or out-of-series can, thanks to its mobility, mend and recharge language: in the form of a name, for example, or a signature.
I am thinking of a little post-it forever stuck in at the beginning of ‘Fors,’ alighting between its title-page and Derrida’s initial question ‘Qu’est-ce qu’une crypte?’ ‘What is a crypt?’[2] Down at the bottom of the left-hand page, he writes:
Under this title and these epigraphs, please read (or, better, skip) what
is merely a too-long prière (make, as I do, what you will of this word)
d'insérer [insert in a book, review slip]. Pages that are more than ever, yes, loose, like the prière-d'insérer, which, moreover, detaches itself without delay and which I assume nevertheless, even before beginning, to be known.[3]
Are you into it? Can you hear something moving around in the dark at the beginning of Fors, all-alonelikeGod or an abandoned stone instrument: a first time still on its way or, at least, on the loose?
I’m hooked by an intuition, the intimation of a meaning, direction, tenor, sense (how does one translate sens?) that, thus far, doesn’t quite belong where it fetches up, here in a discourse on or about a certain cryptic basket or cage that is not quite shut. It speaks to me in Absolute Whisper, a sign of life escaping between the well-known words. Furtively and without really knowing what I’m saying, Ifake reply by repeating a few sounds from the French:
Prière
Prière d’insérer
Pierre
Première
It answers back–off-language, harmonically, as poem-animal, with a creature air or purror bark(make what you will of this word) foreign and necessary to speech,coming so close, silently creeping into words and prising them open.But it knows the game of synonyms. It can frisk with meaning: didn’t it begin at the very moment of the first parenthetical cut: ‘prière (make, as I do, what you will of this word) d'insérer’?Not, or not only, slicing words according to impulse as if they were things. Not, or not only, thinking in images– and therefore notjust ‘It’, not an Id that can’t read, but Ego, the other Ego. You: my lone companion. An Ego, Ichor I is, according to Freud,fundamentally superficial. It is born out of and at the skin: ‘the ego is ultimately derived from bodily sensations, chiefly from those springing from the surface of the body. It may thus be regarded as a mental projection of the surface of the body, besides […] representing the superficies of the mental apparatus.’[4]Skin: a contact-barrier, not a wall. A kind of paper that is capable of reading and therefore of being read.
(I’m describing as best I can the sonorous activity of a word-thing for writing: difference-in-action with an action without-script. Reading begins with bad closure, language left ajar and through the aperture a peep at the ‘mirage of understanding’ that, according to Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, haunts every analyst.[5])
The Desire to Know
The author of Fors, that word-to-the-wise slipped in at the beginning of Abraham and Torok’s book on Wolf Man,insists that his introductory remarks are not going to make what academics might call a ‘contribution to knowledge’.They are connu, known before he starts. He’s a latecomer and to underline this fact, Derrida’s essay is subtitled ‘the Anglish words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’:it’s their words. Instead of offering his own, he rather modestly invites us to read: make what you want, as I do, of this word ‘prière’, prayer.
I have no idea how to say this thing that I can almost-hear.
Cryptonymy is personal. It concerns object-relations. It’s not a matter ofwords in relation to things but of what Derrida calls a ‘new logic of name effects or signature effects.’[6]It’s alsoa question of ‘what is produced in speech or in writing by desire for idiom or an idiom of desire.’[7]There would be no such ‘what’ is a crypt without the question ‘Who?’ Abraham and Torok situate their analysis of Wolf Man in the context of not-knowing and of their desire to know. Wolf Man ‘remains with us analysts, to quicken [tenir en haleine, keep in suspense, as with held breath]our desire to know.’[8]Their work is ‘experimental proof that the analytic process is not solely the making of the patient’ but involves a ‘double evolution’ of ‘two partners at the same time.’[9] In the case of the analysis of Wolf Man this time was the permanently-staggered time of a reading.
Our companion of misfortune in no-knowledge, he has become the symbol of a mirage – haunting every analyst – the mirage of understanding. After so many others, we too have succumbed to it.
Let him be thanked for it!
And let us be forgiven for it![10]
Not knowing allowed the analysts to enter dimensions of experience usually forbidden to theory. In order to understand they embraced all necessary cadences of experience, even going as far as prayer when theyinvoke or address Sergei Pankeiev Wolf Man in his unbreakable solitude, giving thanks and asking forgiveness.[11]Prayer renounces the desire to know. Despite having, so to speak, hacked their way in to the crypt where Wolf Man carefully kept his unspeakable libidinal scene and its words, the analysts preserve a sense of his unknowableness, what Gerard Manley Hopkins described as:
my selfbeing, my consciousness and feeling of myself, the taste of myself, of I and me above and in all things, which is more distinctive than the taste of ale or alum, more distinctive than the smell of walnutleaf or camphor, and is incommunicable by any other means to another man.[12]
Derrida has suggested that ‘love and friendship are born in the experience of this unspeakable selftaste: an unshareable experience and nevertheless shared, the agreement of two renunciations to say the impossible.’[13] The desire to know, however, he associates with‘hatred, jealousy, envy, cruelty,’ which‘do not renounce. That is perhaps why they go together more often with knowledge, inquisitorial curiosity, the scopic drive, and epistemophilia.’[14] Can one imagine a properly friendly and loving kind of research into the unspeakable, which would renounce explanations and investigate by way of selftaste and the accompanying auto-affection of ‘mouth, lips, and tongue,’ which are, Derrida adds ‘places of passage for speech, voice, and ingested food, thus for interiorization in general—along with auto-affection, idealization, mourning work, introjection, or incorporation, and so forth.’[15] Derrida intimates the unspeakable at the end of Fors, when he becomes able to ‘feel [sens], on the tip of my tongue [langue, also ‘language’], the angular cut of a shattered word.’[16] Is this incommunicable or not? One also thinks of ‘Telepathy’ where interiorization isn’t working properly: ‘So, what do you want me to say. I had a premonition of something nasty in it, like a word, or a worm, or a piece of worm that would be a piece of word, and that would be seeking to reconstitute itself by slithering ...’[17] Pain at a distance, the feeling of broken word: this is what Abraham and Torok work on too. At the end of the English edition of The Wolf Man’s Magic Word Maria Torokreconsidered Freud’s notion of‘telepathy’ as:
The precursor to a type of research that dares the imagination as regards oneself and others, that refuses to be imprisoned in systems, mythologies and universal symbolic equivalents. Telepathy would be the name of an ongoing and groping research that – at the moment of its emergence and in the area of its relevance – had not yet grasped the true scope of its own inquiry or the conceptual rigour necessary for its own elaboration.[18]
This kind of research needs readers prepared to be lived by words, to see things in names and to feel themselves seen and invented, from who knows where,bythe other, even from beyond death.
Two Unknowns: the Fractured Symbol
In the course of their reading of past documents surrounding Wolf Man, Abraham and Torok discovered the necessity of two kinds of work on the symbolic material offered to psychoanalytic listening. There was the more familiar though difficult task: finding the unconscious complement of a symbol, its missing unconscious part. Symbols are, we might say, anacoluthic, in honour of the figure of grammatical non-resolution in which a word or part of a sentence calls out for its missing companion.[19] Analysts, Abraham and Torok confirm, listen for the partthat is not there and help restore the resonances and connections between an individual’s enigmatic but still activedesire and the myriad forms available for its expression.
However, this symbolic unity may be subject to an additional fracture. There is such a thing as a broken symbol or a shattered word, what Fors calls a mot brisé. In such a case, analysis ‘would have to reconstitute, one by one, most of the fragments as a first step before being able to put them together.’[20] Only then does the work of joining the symbol with what Abraham and Torok call its ‘cosymbolic complement’ become possible. The future of the whole analytic process arises out of an equation with ‘two unknowns.’[21]In this case these are: the broken symbol that has yet to be fitted together, and then, the meaning or efficacy of the symbol in the life of the one who offers it to the analyst in their speech.
The phrase ‘two unknowns’ also describes the necessarily fictive part of Abraham and Torok’s research: theirassumptions about and constructions of how and why a ‘Stranger’ or foreign body had become incorporated, or had ‘settle[d] in the core[sein]’ of Wolf Man’s Ego.They admitted: ‘we had to do a lot of guesswork, as when one has to compute two unknown quantities on the basis of a single equation.’[22]Therelation, in Wolf Man, between his sister’s image and his own,could not be accounted for in terms of repression, the familiar protective procedure for maintaining forbidden desires. Abraham and Torokintroduced instead their distinctive terms introjection and incorporation. ‘Introjection’ is the word for a process that failed for Wolf Man and they explain that it refers to the way desiresbecome part of the Ego, through ‘the libido’s encounter with a potentially infinite number of instruments for its own symbolic expression.’[23]Not knowing how it was, they had to construct ‘the entire scene’ of Wolf Man’s seduction by his sister. It would be necessary to retrace this processand its ramifications more patiently than I do here. It is described with great care in the first chapter of The Wolf Man’s Magic Word.
Cryptonymy is not a form of forensics. The possibility oflistening to broken words, groups of letters and sounds in a text without giving up on reading, partly depends on telepathy, enabled by Abraham and Torok’s distinction between psychoanalytic understanding and the ‘juridical code’that identifiedlittle Sergei Wolf Man as witness to an incestuous crime that had to be hushed up at all costs.[24] The scene between his father and sister generated extreme libidinal conflict butwhat decisively forbade its symbolic expression and sealed the crypt apparently for good, was an atmosphere of judgement, scandal and shame. According to passage from The Wolf Man’s Magic Word used by Derrida as an epigraph to Fors: ‘The intervention of the mother, with her Russian words, and then the nurse with her English words, closed two doors for him at the same time: the possibility of a sexual ideal, and also any form of aggression directed at the scene.’ To combat the tendency towardscondemnation one must imagine, in the relation between analyst and patient, some external equivalent of the ‘lucid and reflective agency reflecting on words and their signification’ that Abraham and Torok postulate exists within the crypt.[25] In this ‘lucid and yet concealed and isolated area’it is possible for a given word to be understood ‘as is, without being disguised.’[26]
Beauty
In the words of Hélène Cixous, ‘Beauty will no longer be forbidden.’[27]Gerard Manley Hopkins says urgently and already-beautifully in ‘The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo’: ‘beauty-in-the-ghost, delíver it, early now.’[28]We’re a hop and a skip, ora prayer,or some other kind of poetico-literary performative awayfrom God. For Hopkins, beauty is not a matter of mere design but a relation, the ‘outer manifestation or “scape” of an inner energy or activity’[29]and this energy is divine – whence the injunction to give ‘beauty back, beauty, beauty, béauty, back to God beauty’s self and beauty’s giver.’ The poem clearly wishes to perform this giving as well as describing and recommending it to others. Something is taking place at the untouchable skin of writing. There was for Hopkins, a kind of ‘fleece’ at the surface of certainbeautiful surfaces, a sort of down or the douceur of under-fur: ‘the velvetiness of rose-leaves, flesh and other things, duvet.’[30] Thisduvet is especially close to God, Dieu. At school, presumably playing with the letters of his name, they called the poet‘Skin.’[31]Thefleece, down orsurface bloom his poetry identifies with beauty was also something like his proper name.
I don’t know how Nicolas Abraham rendered‘beauty-in-the-ghost’: the linesfrom ‘The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo’that forman epigraph to L’écorce et le noyaucome a little later. I’d like to know what provoked him to translate them, what he heard in them. I can only guess. The lines describe something that, in the poem itself, emerges at the level of listening; of what we might still call ‘form’.Echo is often identified with the mere form of words, empty of meaning, conspiratorial at best. But for Hopkins Echo has meaning, weight, colour, substance and body. The part of his poem translated by Abraham alludes to form as ‘mould’ and insists that this superficial and apparently negligible and lowlything, the body, is the very essence and energy of reading:
Nay, what we had líghthanded left in sűrly the mere mould
Will have waked and have waxed and have walked with the wínd what while we
slept,[32]
This side, that side hűrling a heavyheaded hűndredfold
What while we, whíle we slűmbéred.[33]
Anasemia would be a fine way to read Hopkins: his homophonies and echolocations, the semantic angles stretching and collapsing right and left and lighthanded left, left to move – say, in the lines quoted above, between ‘mould’ and ‘waxed,’ where the wax is what neither fits within nor breaks the mould of form that overgrows force but also names growth out of the soil, a waxing that sets off and moves lightly and nocturnally, ‘walking’ as ghosts are said to do. The movement between words (‘waked … waxed … walked’) waltzes us off to a ‘Somewhere elsewhere’ that is ‘not within seeing of the sun.’ Reading gives us places in another way, at once closer and more distant than our experience of space in sensory perception.
But first, a word about care, and what Hopkins called ‘care kept’.According to his poem, we can be at once‘lighthanded’ (careless) and ‘heavyheaded’ (burdened by troubles or cares) in our relation to ourselves. This type of human care or grief is mysteriously inevitable but unnecessary; a suffering experienced separately by each of us alone in our innermost isolate being. We are asleep, Hopkins suggests, to a nocturnal and very real energy within us which can act in the world. There is also another and otherwise-tender care in the lines Abraham translated. It is divinely fond, more loving and more careful even than our relation to ourselves. Itssolicitude or consideration does not arrest, squeeze, kill, keep, somehow conceptualize and therefore lose its objects. Hopkins’s poem attributes this tender and most generously open consideration to God. Abraham affirms, by translating it, an ineffable treasuring of life that accompanies its wearying difficulty.
Ő then, weary then why should we tread? O whý are we so haggard at the heart,
ső cáre-cóiled, cáre-killed, só fágged, só fáshed, só cógged, só cűmbéred,
When the thing we freely főrfeit is kept with főnder a care,
Fonder a cáre kept than we could have kept it, kept
Fár with fonder a care (and wé, we should have lost it) fíner, főnder
A care kept.—Where kept? Do but tell us whére kept, where.—
Where: in the body, in the text?Hopkins’s was careful to write with reference to physical things. He told Robert Bridges: ‘the thought is of beauty as of something that can be physically kept and lost and by physical things only, like keys.’[34]Earlier the poem has announced:
Yes I cán tell such a key, I dó know such a place,
Where whatever's prízèd and passes of us, everything that's fresh and fast flýing of us, seems to us sweet of us and swiftly awáy with, done awáy with, undőne,
Űndone, done with, soon dőne with, and yet dearly and dangerously swéet
Of us, the wimpled-wáter-dimpled, not-by-mőrning-matchèd face,
The flower of beauty, fleece of beauty,
The flower of beauty, fleece of beauty, too too apt to, ah! to fléet,
Never fleets more, fastened with the ténderest truth
To its őwn best being and its loveliness of youth: it is an everlástingness of, O it is an áll youth!